Part Seven - Summer Break (Sophomore → Junior Year)
The summer between sophomore and junior year represented the midway point in my education, assuming I was going to be having a standard four-year length for my education. The length was standard; the education, anything but.
Again, I still had a light load of classes, but it only meant I needed to be in a classroom twice a week, mostly to ensure I didn't leave campus for too long, I think, in looking back at it. Being taught to think at scale isn't a traditional way of teaching, and it meant our brains were wired differently than most of the people we grew up with. People are taught what thinking at scale means, but they generally aren't taught to make it their default. We were especially strange in that we almost always thought that way, except when it came to ourselves, which I've long suspected led to C.A.R.P.'s inevitable failure, although I don't know that I could prove that.
Then again, I'm
also
not entirely sure that C.A.R.P. failed in what it set out to do.
Long-term survival may have never been in the cards for Dr. Igarashi, as weird as that sounds. She had to be smart enough to see some of the writing on the wall regarding the school's eventual downfall, which wasn't anywhere as far in the future as many of us would have suspected. I do wonder what became of her, at spare moments when my brain isn't focusing on a bigger problem. Even with all the news coverage of the last couple of years, nobody's said anything about her at all, which is more than a little disturbing. They all refer to her as 'missing,' which is creepy enough all on its own.
Mainly summers were meant for us to develop ourselves as individuals, but I spent a decent part of the second summer cultivating the relationships between me, Julia and Chelsea. They didn't mesh together as immediately as I would've liked, but it also wasn't like they were at each other's teeth either. In fact, it was more like each of them was trying to figure out how to make the other person fit into their worldview, and that was slightly more challenging than I think either of them had expected it to be, based on their first impressions and limited research they'd done on each other.
Chelsea was the kind of person who paid attention to every little detail, almost obsessively. It meant she needed our apartment to be clear and orderly. That rubbed against Julia the wrong way at first, because she felt like there was too much structure being inflicted on us, that we were being walled into a restrictive, predictable cage of a home. After a bit, though, it became clear that finding a middle ground wasn't really going to be all that hard - Chelsea didn't mind that Julia just tossed her clothes on the floor before hopping in the shower, as long as she put them in the hamper
after
she got
out
of the shower. Chelsea didn't mind short-term messes; she just didn't want long-term chaos. Julia liked to do things without too much planning; Chelsea was all about the plan. That left me smack dab in the middle, although the two sides weren't the miles apart they were when I'd first considered them.
I found the way to make it work was to play to each woman's strength and not push her against her weaknesses. Julia preferred sport and outdoor activity; Chelsea hated the great outdoors and would opine so at the drop of a hat. And yet, despite all the differences, the two actually became good friends. Both loved movies, music and live entertainment, and as long as I made sure I wasn't neglecting one in favor of the other too often, and working to schedule stuff that had us going as a group regularly, it just meant I had to consider what was going on.
Unlike Julia, who just seemed to think of C.A.R.P. as some sort of egghead breeding ground, Chelsea was fascinated by the sorts of things me and the other alphas were constantly discussing. The constant refrain for us was cost versus benefit, and believe you me, we'd got brutal and efficient about calculating it. We even had this imaginary constant we'd made up, which we called an Igarashi Dot. The Igarashi Dot was what the equivalent of one human life was, in terms of resources spent to get it to that point versus the amount of resources that would be reclaimed by ending it. We would use the Dot to start thinking about the really horrific shit that none of us wanted to
admit
we were thinking about. How many lives were worth changing the economic structure of a country? One Dot per one thousand people? Per
ten
thousand people?
Chelsea had taken a wild interest in our speculations and was doing everything she could to convert those into actionable gambles with our savings, nothing that would break the bank if it went astray, but enough that if a few of them paid off, we'd eventually get to the point where we were very comfortable in terms of funds to live off.
We made our first million before the end of the summer between our sophomore and junior years, on the back of a couple of smart gambles early into the development and deployment of fiber across the country. I'd expected the rollout to be a lot slower, but it turned out there were more people rushing towards the future than I'd expected there to be, and the tempo was set to high, rather than low.
The three of us went out to celebrate, and ended up getting a hotel room down on the Santa Cruz beaches where we fucked like rabbits, because we were young and suddenly rich. It was nice to fall asleep to the sound of ocean waves literally within walking distance of our room, but because of the CARP rules, we couldn't stay long, and headed back the next day. I'm still not entirely sure what the rules regarding spending almost all our time on campus were, but I almost wonder if there was some kind of experimental tech in the walls or the water, working to reduce our reliance on long-established norms, and to consider any sort of societal taboo as a 'guideline' that we should only work within if we saw a benefit to using them.
Summer classes were long-thought studies, designed to focus on systems that were highly entrenched, so we couldn't pull them apart as easily, and we couldn't just tear into them like we normally would during fall or spring classes. Each summer, we generally focused on one or two very complex problems. The previous year, we'd been focusing on the international currency exchange market, and all the ways we could put our thumbs on the scales without anyone catching on. This year, we were looking into the property market and how it was being used to exploit people with low income in ways that they hadn't even begun to realize. Land ownership was a pretty elaborate scheme to drain people and funnel the money in very specific ways. Not only was it a system we saw easy ways to disrupt, we could see that some people were already starting to break the home ownership system, with mortgages that were clearly bad under the most cursory of glances.
So, yeah, predicted the housing crash that's hitting right now almost a decade ago.
Go me.
You're probably wondering what sort of solutions we reached, and one of the ones I'm still the most in favor of is giving every single American a home that's theirs. We'd start with stackable large, condensed units - a hundred or so apartments layered on top of a floor or two of commercial businesses, to centralize the work force. We could get past the labor shortage by requiring everyone who would
get
one of these homes to help
build
, say, twenty or thirty of them. Once you had everyone with permanent housing that they owned, you could start working towards bigger and better things, the sort of public works that the country used to be renowned for - the Hoover Dam, Interstate-80... If you even redirected, say, a third of the military for just five to ten years, you could turn the United States into the kind country that had medicine for all, housing for all and work for anyone who wanted a job. Sure, there would be those that would call it 'socialism,' but the real complaint of those people would be that they couldn't make a buck off how it was being done, or that it would be encroaching into the seemingly endless profit/growth cycle they expected their business to eternally live by.
You know what kind of life form lives with endless growth?
